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Camming is over twenty years old but the Times still feels the need to put the term in scare quotes
Laughing to myself over the fact that it apparently took a fucking pandemic for the Times to consider the decades old practice of being a cam girl to be worthy of coverage https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/10/style/camsoda-onlyfans-streaming-sex-coronavirus.html?referringSource=articleShare">https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/1...
I skimmed the article because as far as I could tell it was just Camming 101 which is a bummer because there are actually interesting stories to be told about sex work right now.
I got interviewed for a piece someone is writing about sex work and the pandemic a few days ago, and one of the points I made — which is kind of nodded to in this piece — is that despite the existence of cam sites and clip stores, sex workers can’t always transition online easily
Because — and this is something a lot of people outside the industry don’t understand — the skills involved in different branches of sex work are, uh, different.
A full service sex worker isn’t automatically going to be a good porn performer (and vice versa). Strippers can’t necessarily do either of those jobs well. Even porn performers — who often rely on others to shoot and light them — aren’t automatically going to be great at camming.
The fact that all of these jobs involve monetizing a sexual performance does not mean they’re interchangeable! Strippers and full service sex workers do a lot more direct interaction with clients — in many cases, they end up acting as pseudotherapists for clients.
That’s a dramatically different skill set from porn performers, who are far more focused on being able to make their sexual performances look enticing to a camera’s eye (something FSSWs don’t really have to think about at all).
And, of course, the fact that someone is a sex worker doesn’t guarantee that they have home internet or a set up that’s friendly to camming, nor does it guarantee that they’ll be comfortable doing their work in a less private, more easily archived medium.
Write *that* story, NY Times
